Nuclear Fiction

By MAUREEN DOWD

When W. debated Al Gore, it was the Insufficient versus the Insufferable.

When W. debated John Kerry, it was the Obfuscating versus the
Oscillating.

We face a choice now between a president who rolled us on
Iraq and a senator who got rolled by the president on Iraq.

George Bush
is not giving an inch on Iraq. He's toughing out the cascade of confirmation
and criticism from his own people about the hyperpower hyperbole that led to an
unnecessary war and an unruly occupation. His advisers say it's better for the
president to appear out of touch than apologetic. He'd rather seem delusional
than deluded.

He can't admit what the Duelfer report says, that Saddam
was no threat to the U.S. or any other country. The mushroom cloud was a Fig
Newton of Dick Cheney's feverish imagination. That would mean W. didn't fix
his father's screw-up, but he screwed up his father's fix. A big Oedipal
oops.

After Bush 41's Persian Gulf war, Saddam devolved into the Norma
Desmond of vicious dictators, shrinking but pretending to still be big, writing
romance novels, trying to order liposuction machines, teeth-whitening material
and hair transplant equipment, soaking up American culture like his favorite
song, Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night,'' and his favorite book, Ernest
Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea."

The president may not have
gotten his money's worth with the report of Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S.
weapons inspector. After all, in a vain retroactive attempt to justify his
hokum about W.M.D., he had 1,200 people working for 15 months - stretching our
scarce supply of Arab linguists - to produce 918 pages at a cost of about a
billion dollars just to find out that Saddam would have liked to have had
weapons if he could have, but he couldn't, so he didn't.

But at least
for his billion, the president got some earnest Introduction to American
Literature analysis of the Iraqi dictator and his taste for some Western
culture, noting that Saddam felt a kinship with Hemingway's protagonist
Santiago, the poor Cuban fisherman (even though the rich Saddam liked to
grenade-fish - toss a grenade in the water and then send in scuba divers to
fetch the dead fish).

"Saddam's affinity for Hemingway's story is
understandable, given the former president's background, rise to power,
conception of himself and Hemingway's use of a rustic setting similar to Tikrit
to express timeless themes," the report stated. "In Hemingway's story, Santiago
hooks a great marlin, which drags his boat out to sea. When the marlin finally
dies, Santiago fights a losing battle to defend his prize from sharks, which
reduce the great fish, by the time he returns to his village, to a skeleton.
The story sheds light on Saddam's view of the world and his place in it. ...
to Saddam even a hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one."

Even
though his own report stated that U.N. sanctions had worked to defang Saddam,
Mr. Bush decided to stand firm on nonsense, insisting in the debate Friday
night that "sanctions were not working. The United Nations was not effective at
removing Saddam Hussein."

When a questioner named Linda asked the
president to give three bum decisions he had made in office, Mr. Bush took a
pass. Lincoln could admit mistakes. J.F.K. could admit mistakes. But W.
thinks admitting mistakes is for powder puffs. Of his decision to invade Iraq,
he said: "Sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you
think they're right." Or you stick to them even after you know they're
wrong.

The president's living in a dream world. He kept
insisting that 75 percent of Al Qaeda has been "brought to justice," even though
such a statistic is misleading, since counterterrorism experts say that the
invasion of Iraq was a recruiting boon for Osama and that Al Qaeda has
metastasized and spawned other terrorist groups.

Mr. Bush tried to
pretend the devastating Duelfer report backed him up, noting after the report
came out that Saddam "retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the
intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and could have passed this
knowledge to our terrorist enemies."

W. should have followed his
father's policy on hypotheticals. As Poppy Bush would say, when someone asked
him to be speculative: "If a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its tail on the
ground."